


A Man in Black, a Woman in Blue

by Teawithmagician



Series: Billy & Goody [5]
Category: The Magnificent Seven (2016)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Family Issues, Genderbending, Het, Identity Reveal, Internalized Misogyny, Misogyny, Period-Typical Sexism, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-17
Updated: 2016-12-17
Packaged: 2018-09-09 07:25:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8881285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Teawithmagician/pseuds/Teawithmagician
Summary: Billy is going to walk the streets of Rose Creek as herself. She is not going to hide anymore.





	

**Author's Note:**

> *fem!Billy  
> *a heavy cloud of PTSD  
> *abusive family moments mentioned

Cullen gets Billy a dark blue skirt and a white blouse. When Billy puts them on and looks into the mirror, she doesn't look pretty. There's a scar on the left side of her face, curling at the temple. 

Cullen stands behind Billy's back. She holds the brush like a gun, ready to give it away. Billy raises her arms and takes the hairpin out of the bun at the top of her head. Her long coarse hair spill over her shoulders.

“Do you need help with the brush?” Cullen asks. 

“I'm not a savage.” The hairpin in Billy's hand is long and silver dark. “I know how to use it.”

“I know,” Cullen responds quietly. 

Her house is small and poor, but clean and a bit empty for a married woman. Just the furniture and a place to cook food, no trinkets, no whatnot – nothing. 

“I know you fight alongside with them. Tell them I want to fight, too.”

“You can tell it by yourself,” Billy takes the knife belts, lying on the floor. She holds the knife belts in her hands, looking in the mirror. There are freckles on her nose and her teeth are chipped.

“I've already told them,” Cullen's eyes glows with a hellfire. It's cold, and blue, and heated white like steel. 

Billy puts her knife belts over the fest and tightens the belts. She won't need them today, but she wants to keep them close to her chest, because her knives are her, too – just like her hat, her hair, and her vest.

“If you've already told them,” Billy takes her hat from the nail on the wall and puts it on, touching the edge of the pent before leaving, “it is enough.”

The floor in Cullen's house is made of the cheap light wood. Billy's boots sticking from under her skirt look big and dusty on the floor. Cullen must wash it often to have it that light. 

When she had a man, she didn't think of murder. If Bogue didn't kill her man, Cullen would just keep her mouth shut and rub and wash the light pine floors of her nice little house. Now she holds hairbrush like a gun and wants revenge.

Billy grabs the handle. She feels like – what is that strange word Goody uses to describe it and makes Billy angry because she just can talk like normal people do? An imposter. The dress Goody gave her, it wasn't that way.

Billy wore the dress and pretended to be a lady, while Goody acted like a gentleman. Now Billy puts on the skirt because she wants to walk the city with her head up and her skirt dangling down her legs, knives at her vest and loose hair under her hat.

Outside, the sun is shining. The horses raise a cloud of dust, Billy hears the hammering on the crossroad, where townsmen repair the burnt church. She hears long sighs and spitting of the farmers digging a trench and children playing on the saloon's balcony where the bags with sand already lie, ready for the attack.

Sam Chisolm stands at the crossroad, his jacket off, his hands resting on his hips. Raising his head and squinting, he watches the townsmen walking on the rooftops and making covers from every pipe or slope of a roof.

It is not hard to make the first step. Billy made steps harder when she had a basket full of stones over her shoulders. She a knife and drove it in between the man's ribs. He was a bully, and he took better jobs. Billy killed him because she had to, and she never regretted.

It was another man, too. The foreman who understood Billy wasn't a boy. Billy pretended to be weak, to be crying, to beg him for mercy in a bad Chinese-English though she spoke good enough to understand and be understood. She killed him when he tore off her pants.

She killed a rat who snitched and told the taskmaster what they were talking about in the camp by throwing a knife into his back. They said, if the workers wouldn't tell whose were those hand and the knife, everyone went to the jail and was to be hanged next day.

Billy stole a horse and run. Down the dry river channel, Billy met a youngster in a sassy black suit. He was swarthy like a Spaniard and his hands were tender like lady's. Billy was on a watch for him under the shore of a dry red river till the night came, where she decided what did she want.

Billy killed him and took his clothes and horse, a mean stallion the youngster called Rex. Billy killed him not because he was dangerous or could told the railroad deputies he saw a man on the run. Billy killed him because his suit was pretty, and she wanted a nice suit.

She adored that Spanish black suit because it made her free. She didn't wear a worker's clothes anymore, she was wearing a suit and carrying two guns with pearl levers and a knife made of perfectly balanced steel. 

But Billy wasn't free. A man in a black Spanish suit was free, and Billy was no man.

Billy walks the street of Rose Creek and breathes calmly. The hammers are still knocking and the farmers are still swearing. Nothing is actually happening in the town preparing for the war, still Billy knows she is being looked at.

Sam Chisolm watches her with the corner of the eye not driving his eyes away from the sand bags carried to the joint of the two roofs' slopes. Women who pour the water into the red hands of the men digging in the thick red soil watch her and a man chewing tobacco at the hitching point look at her.

Billy feels a look from the dormer, too. It's a perfect place for a sniper or a sharpshooter. Billy knows he is standing there, watching her with a cigarette in his mouth, his fingers knocking on the windowsill. 

When Billy approaches Sam, she looks right over his left ear. That's what her mother did, never looked into her father's eyes, always a bit aside. He beat her, of course he did, and Billy's mother rolled up in a tight shivering clew under the rain of punches, but never even moaned.

Billy can't make herself looking Sam into the eyes. She could look him into the eyes when she was in her Spanish black suit, but she doesn't wear it anymore. She wears a dense dark blue skirt, and a blouse, and a black hat, and a black vest, and she is a woman with the guns and the knives, the one who is going to be killed and raped because she dares to resist.

“Cullen wants to fight,” Billy says. 

“G'day first,” Sam answers. He stands with his hands on his hips, yet he is looking at the rooftop no more. “Yes, she wants to.”

“Faraday teaches her how to shoot and not to be shot. You'll make her our cover.”

“Yes,” Sam agrees. The ray of sunshine gets into his eyes and he blinks discontentedly. “I will make her our cover. Those people are no soldiers, but they learn. The ones who learn better go in the front, the ones who learn slower go in the back.”

Billy listens to Sam's voice, trying to hear a sound of disrespect. She wants to see the townsmen calling her names and starting a fight, yet she doesn't. Deep in her mind, Billy understands that it won't be. They know she is no weak, even if not a man. It's hard for her to cope with it.

Billy dresses up to prove, and it seems like no one is going to argue. She knows people will talk, but no one will dare to tell her what they will be talking about. Billy feels the looks with her skin, but she doesn't hear the whispers and it drives her mad.

“I guess, your name is not Billy,” Sam looks at Billy. Billy looks back, this time at the spot between his eyebrows with a few white hairs growing. “Will you introduce yourself?”

He talks like Goody sometimes, Billy thinks, too polite. Goody makes it jolly, makes it flirty, makes it sound like a gentleman everyone is destined to adore. Sam makes it earnestly and solemnly, and it makes his words sound overweighted, every word heavy like a rock.

“My name is Bai Ling,” Billy says. “You've hired Sharpshooter, and you've hired me. Nothing has changed but the name.”

Billy turns her back on Sam and walks to the familiar house. There's a man in a gray suit, standing in the doors. When Billy walks across the road, she raises her hand to shield from the rays of sun blazing over the street.

There's no tension in the air. Billy has seen it all before. When something is going to happen, the air crackles with the electricity. The air is dense, and heavy, and sticks to Billy like mud. They look at her like she was an exotic beast, and Billy feels it stronger than she did while wearing the black Spanish suit.

She walks the steps, hiding her face behind her arm. She looks up, squinting. Goody stands tall with a strange expression on his face. If Billy doesn't know him so well she would decide that he looks puzzled.

“Why would you do that? I thought you wished no one knew.”

“You thought. And have you asked?” Billy's cheek twitches. The sunshine makes everything look like burning in the golden flame.


End file.
